Race 2 Kart Prep

With race 2 quickly approaching, there was some work that I needed and wanted to get done to the kart. There were some things that I notice from race 1 that I thought would make me a little faster and more competitive, these are the things that I wanted to change.

First, and most importantly, Is switching out the seat. I bruised my ribs in the first practice and I strongly believe it was because the seat that is currently on the kart is too small for me. So I purchased a Righetti Ridolfi X6 Kart Seat.

To install it, i removed the seat strut on the brake side of the seat.

I removed the bolts on the sides of the seat that attach it to the chassis.

Motor Side Seat Attachment

Brake Side

I removed the two bolts on the bottom of the seat that attached to the chassis on the bottom.

This left a gaping hole in the chassis where the seat used to be!

Now to install the new seat, this in itself seems like an easy task, but the seat that I took out was 2 sizes smaller so the bracket on the left side of the chassis needed to be pulled out. To do this, i put the kart on the ground and used a very large pipe to pry the bracket out enough to put the new seat in. There are all kinds of proper ways to adjust the seat for the kart, but i used the old seat,I slid the seat into the new one, made new holes, and drilled away. I did the upper ones first and adjusted the bottom ones as necessary. The seat is slightly crooked, but with its size, i don’t know how else i could have done it without moving the motor out of the way and adjusting the other bracket.

The other thing that i wanted to change out was the rear gear. The kart currently has a 77T rear gear in it, it seemed to be a little lacking off the corners and i was unable to keep up with the other drivers. I thought that putting the 78T gear on would help.

This is a pretty simple process, first you need to loosen the Allen bolts that keep the motor in place.

Then you have to move the rubber stopper in so that you can slide the motor back and take the chain off.

At this point, you can undo the 3 (at least there’s 3 on mine) 10mm bolts that hold the rear gear in place.

And put the new gear on. You will then need to re-attach the chain to the motors sprocket and re-tension the chain by moving the motor forward. There should be a little bit of slack on the chain but not too much.

Other items that needed to be tackled was to re-route all the electrical to the center of the kart. These items used to be attached to the back of the old seat, but i have decided to route all of the electronics to the front of the seat as to not have to drill more holes into the new seat and to make it easy in case i needed to change it back to the old one.